


i missed your skin when you were east

by badlesbian



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-02-13 12:05:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12983694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badlesbian/pseuds/badlesbian
Summary: roy and hughes, figuring it out.slight canon divergence in which roy moves to central much earlier (around the same time he recruits ed), so set about three years before brotherhood/manga really begins.





	1. day 36

Kissing Maes Hughes felt just as good as he had dreamed it would when he was eighteen. Lips soft against his own, hand firm against the small of his back -- Maes kissed like it was the last chance they’d ever have, like he was a soldier going off to war, saying a last farewell to his already grieving fiancee. It was dramatic as all hell, but that’s the way he was. That’s the way Roy loved him.

 

“You smell like cigarettes,” Roy murmured against his lips, breathing it in as he said so. “Thought you were going to quit, give your lungs a break.”

 

Hughes let his head fall against his chest, defeated. “I brushed my teeth, twice!”

 

“Smoke lingers,” Roy said, raising a hand to tug at Hughes’ uniform collar. “Your clothes, your hair. I don’t see why you try to hide it, you know I don’t mind.”

 

“You’ve threatened Havoc with incineration a dozen times this week.”

 

Roy laughed, a low chuckle that rumbled against Hughes’ own chest. “I’m not _fucking_ Havoc.”

 

" _Roy_."

 

Roy laughed again. That was another thing about Maes -- he was an incurable romantic. He never said the f-word in relation to what they were doing, always “making love,” always “being intimate” (awful, he should really give him more shit for that one.) Roy teased him for it, accusing him of reading too many of his sister’s illicit paperbacks during his formative years. Despite it all, they both knew Roy ate it up like nobody’s business. He’d read his fair share of paperbacks too, after all.

 

Roy was going to say something else, but he got distracted by the extremely inviting curve of Maes’ jaw, and Maes got distracted by Roy’s mouth. He often did.

 

Roy always liked men with facial hair. Moustaches, he could give or take, but there was something so warm, so masculinely comforting about a man with a beard. He was almost suspicious that Maes had grown his own because he knew Roy’s preferences, but Roy had never spoken about it, and all the men he’d been with since Maes had known him had been clean-shaven. Cadet dress code, always a killjoy, and after that, just luck of the draw.

 

He knew Gracia liked it too, though he still didn’t know how he felt about knowing that. Roy may have her blessing to do…whatever it was they were doing in both verbal __and__ written form, but he still couldn’t help feeling like an interloper on an otherwise perfect family unit. They hadn’t brought it up with Elicia yet, and Roy doubted he’d ever be comfortable doing so. Maes insisted she needed to know how important her Uncle Roy was -- to Maes, to their family, needed to know he was more than a funny man who was nice to her daddy. Roy appreciated the sentiment but he still couldn’t banish the thought that what they had wasn’t meant for little girls’ ears. (Okay, so he may have internalized some stuff that probably wasn’t healthy. A lot of stuff. But that was between him and his God.)

 

“Roy?” Maes’ soft voice broke through his haze of still questionably-deserved guilt, and he realized he had been still for a period of time just past uncomfortable. “You still with me, buddy?”

 

Roy sighed, barely more than a breath into the comforting curve of Maes’ neck. “Sorry.”

 

He felt Maes’ hand slide up from his waist (don’t leave, don’t leave) to rub steady, firm circles on his upper back. “What happened?”

 

Roy shook his head, breathed in the smell of tobacco that lingered on his skin. “Not important.” He felt Maes shift, clearly about to protest, and corrected himself. “Not _productive_.Not now.”

 

Maes nodded, mollified, but kept up the steady circles. “Let’s sit down. I’ve got the number of a decent Xingese place that delivers,” and here he pulled back to grin wickedly at Roy, “…and about a thousand pictures of your niece you haven’t seen yet.”

 

Roy groaned.

 

They both knew he loved it.


	2. day 45

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cheers bro

It was one in the morning when he got the call. Maes had been snuggled up to his wife after a pleasant, if tiring, night with his family. Elicia was young enough that they were still waking up in shifts, and he had just finished the last one of the night. He had only just gotten comfortable when the phone rang.

 

Maes groaned at the shrill sound, cursing every God he could think of even as he disentangled himself from his wife (his beautiful, warm, extremely cozy wife) and dragged himself to the phone on their bedside table. Luckily Gracia remained dead to the world, as did Elicia if the lack of screaming from the nursery was to be trusted. Nevertheless, he answered in the lowest voice he could. “Major Hughes speaking,” he said, trying to sound like he didn’t just wake up. In his line of work, there was really only one reason someone would be calling him this late, and he dreaded it more than anything. Either that, or…

 

“It’s me.”

 

Maes sighed in relief, slumping down to rest his elbows on his thighs. “Roy. I thought you were Central about to tell me to break out the evidence bags.”

 

“Not this time.”

 

They were silent for a while. Maes had learned that with phone calls like this, it was best to just wait it out, let Roy talk on his own time. Whatever he had to say, rushing it along with questions made him shut up like a steel trap. It could take days, weeks to get it to open its jaws, and at that point the leg was a goner.

 

Maes shook his head slightly. He had to stop making analogies on three hours of sleep.

 

“Did I wake you up?” Roy said finally. So, still stalling, but talking nonetheless.

 

Hughes hummed a negative, rubbing a hand across his stubbled face. “Elicia was being fussy, I only just lay down myself.”

 

“Oh.” Silence, again. This was the point at which Roy would feel guilty for depriving him of sleep, sleep that he was lacking because of his baby daughter, whose time Roy was monopolizing with his adulterous activities, who really should just call this whole thing off and let Maes live his happy normal life, so on and so forth into self loathing. Maes had heard it all before, and it hurt that Roy was hurting, but at this point all he could do was be there, ready to reassure him when he needed it.

 

In this case, Maes cut it off before it could begin. A risky maneuver (again, steel trap, mutilated leg) but sometimes it was for the best to keep Roy off that path. “You can’t sleep either, huh?”

 

Roy fidgeted with the cord. “Don’t want to. Been having dreams again.”

 

And there it was. They all had them, flashbacks to Ishval, memories twisted into ugly, poisonous nightmares. Many felt they deserved them; they’d done ugly things, after all. All “justified” in the name of war, in the name of Amestris, but still. Still.

 

Roy had a harder time than most. Maybe because he was a State Alchemist, maybe because he was just the kind of person those poisonous vines knew how to crawl into. But Maes knew he’d also had nightmares before Ishval had even begun. Ever since they were roommates in the academy at least, but probably earlier too. There were a lot of things Roy didn’t tell him about, didn’t know how to talk about. Maes had some suspicions - he knew Roy had a history of dating men who were all wrong for him, and probably for just about anyone else too, and he knew a boy couldn’t grow up the way Roy did without coming out of it with some sort of complex. But if Roy didn’t know how to talk about it, Maes sure as hell didn’t either.

 

“Do you want to talk about it?”

 

Silence.

 

“Do you want me to come over?”

 

Maes regretted the question as soon as it left his mouth. It was hard for Roy to ask for something he needed; it was always better to phrase a question in such a way that he didn’t have to say “yes.”

 

He rephrased. “Do you want to be alone right now?”

 

“No.”

 

Maes sighed, relieved. Roy’s mentality was hell to figure out; it always felt like a great success when he did something right by him. “I’ll be over in twenty.”

 

Roy sighed his own relief, a little shaky. “Thank you.”

 

“Mm,” Maes hummed, and was just about to hang up the phone when Roy spoke again.

 

“Could you make it fifteen?”

 

If Roy was actually asking something of his own volition, it was much worse than he’d gathered. Maes fumbled on the floor for the pants he’d worn the previous day. “I’ll be there,” he told him, and heard the line click.

 

Maes glanced over at Gracia, debating whether it was better for her to get some sleep for once in a lifetime but wake up with a note instead of a husband, or for her to know that he was safe but lose precious minutes of sleep. He decided on the former. As much as he knew that what he and Roy were doing wasn’t wrong, it still felt a little scandalous to be ducking out in the middle of the night to go to his boyfriend’s house.

 

On a whim, he grabbed the blanket they kept on their couch, the one imported from Xing that was softer than rabbit fur and dyed a deep, expensive blue. If it could comfort a teething infant, it had to have some sort of magic, and Maes needed whatever help he could get.

 

\--

 

The apartment was dark when he arrived, only the faint music coming from within betraying that there was a person still awake inside. He knocked once, just once, and suddenly the door was open and Roy was in his arms.

 

“Oof,” he said reflexively, not expecting this, not so soon at least. Roy just tightened his arms around his back, breathed heavy into his chest. Maes hated to break the embrace - Roy so rarely initiated contact like this - but it was becoming clear that Roy wasn’t letting go anytime soon, and they were both beginning to shiver from the chill of the winter night. “Let’s get inside, yeah?”

 

Upon entrance, he realized it wasn’t much warmer inside than outside after all. Roy didn’t even have a sweater on, he realized, just the white undershirt he wore beneath his uniform. “You don’t even have a fire going? Roy, no wonder you can’t sleep.”

 

Roy stood awkwardly at his side now that the embrace was broken. “Didn’t want to, uh.” He rubbed his wrist in lieu of tugging at the glove he wasn’t wearing.

 

“There’s a thing called matches, dumbass,” Hughes said, and pulled him away from the entryway to sit him down on the couch. “Just because you have magic doesn’t mean you have to use it for everything.”

 

“’S not magic, it’s science,” Roy grumbled, but let Maes move him as he pleased. “You brought a blanket,” he observed as Maes knelt in front of the fireplace. “Planning a slumber party?”

 

“Something like that,” Hughes grinned, and sat back on his feet as the flames began to catch.

 

Satisfied the fire would take care of itself, he turned back to Roy, who hadn’t moved an inch since Maes put him there. He looked cold, and maybe a bit tipsy. “C’mere,” he said, quiet.

 

Roy slotted stiffly into his side, resting his chin on Hughes' shoulder, watching the fire flicker and dance. Maes held him, one arm around his waist.

 

"You're too skinny," he scolded. "I shouldn't be able to feel your ribs like this. You have to get better at taking care of yourself or you'll never get past Major General."

 

"Not even a Lieutenant General? I must really be slipping if Fantasy Roy has his aspirations set so low."

 

Hughes smiled wickedly. "Fantasy Roy may have slightly different priorities."

 

Roy snorted and gave him a good elbow to the side for taking the bait.

 

They fell silent, letting the fire warm them. Maes vaguely registered that the music he heard earlier was still playing; Roy must have put on a record before he got there. He recognized it as one of the Cretan records that had gotten popular as of late - he didn’t speak the language, but it sounded nice. Slow, romantic, simple. It was the kind of thing he would’ve liked to dance to at his wedding.

 

“This is actually a pretty sad song, if you listen to the lyrics,” Roy said. God, it was jarring how they could be on the same wavelength like that. Useful as hell, especially since most of their public conversations involved some sort of code (though that could just be a Roy thing too, he did the same with Hawkeye), but still weird.

 

“I didn’t know you spoke Cretan.”

 

“Massalian, and I don’t, not really. Just enough to sound like I do, and to flirt with people who don’t speak it. Madame Christmas thought a gentleman should at least __sound__ like he speaks several languages.”

 

“How many is several for you?”

 

Roy grinned, turning the charm all the way up. It was brilliant. “Seven. Though I actually am bilingual, so I guess it’s only __mostly__  lying.”

 

Maes was still caught up in that dazzling smile. He loved it when Roy got into his finely trained gentleman mode - to anyone else it seemed perfectly lovely, but anyone who really knew Roy saw it for what it was.

 

Luckily there weren’t many people who really knew Roy.

 

“Xingese is useful, though,” Maes argued, trying to distract himself from the gleam in Roy’s dark eyes. “You can’t throw it around to flirt, someone might actually know what you’re saying.”

 

“Doubt it,” Roy said, flicking his eyes down to Maes’ lips. Bastard knew what he was doing, and Maes loved it. Hated it. “I’ve got no one to practice with these days. Someday I’ll just forget it entirely.”

 

He threw out the last statement like it didn’t matter, but Maes knew it must hurt. Madame Christmas aside, Roy’s only remaining links to his family were his appearance and the language his mother had spoken with him. He liked to act like he didn’t care, but it couldn’t be easy.

 

That was another thing they didn’t talk about, though, so Maes let his gaze slip down to Roy’s lips again. He had a really nice mouth. He felt like not a lot of people knew that about Lieutenant Colonel Mustang.

 

He swallowed. “You didn’t call me here for this.”

 

Roy smirked, but his eyes dimmed. “Didn’t I?”

 

“No.” He sure hoped not. Hughes liked to think he’d gotten pretty good at reading Roy, but it wasn’t an exact science.

 

Roy sighed, turning away from the staring contest to gaze at the fire again. “No, I didn’t. I wish I did though.”

 

Didn’t he know it. Sex was so much easier than this, this feelings thing, this relationship thing. But Maes refused to be another in the faceless parade of Roy’s boyfriends. He couldn’t, and they both knew it, and they both wanted it that way.

 

Fuck if it wasn’t hard to break free from a pattern, though. Maes had been happily married for years, he knew this territory, but this was new to Roy, and he still found himself falling into old habits.

 

Sex was easy.

 

“Can you.” Roy rubbed his hand across his face, sighing again. He was so tired all of a sudden. He felt so heavy. “Can you come to bed with me?”

 

“Roy…”

 

“Not a sex thing. I mean literally come to bed with me.” This was stupid. He sounded so awkward asking for things, that’s why he never did it. Especially something as stupid as this, calling up his friend (?) in the middle of the night to help him fall asleep like a child crawling into their parents’ bedroom.

 

He could feel Maes staring at him.

 

“Yeah,” Maes said softly, after a moment. “Yeah, I can do that.”

 

Roy’s room was a mess, as expected. Papers strewn across the floor, file boxes piled on the chair by the door. The bed was the only really decent piece of furniture Roy owned; dark wood, solid headboard, and an expensive queen mattress that Maes was deeply jealous of. He’d only been in Central a couple months and hadn’t had the time - or more likely, hadn’t cared enough - to replace the cheap furniture the landlord provided, but after years on military cots, this was a necessity. Maes certainly appreciated it.

 

“Don’t step on the papers, they have to stay arranged like that or I’ll have to start all over again.”

 

Maes hazarded a glance at one of the papers as he tiptoed around them. “Why are you reading about indigenous insects? I didn’t know you cared about entomology.”

 

Roy looked at him like he had just asked how long the Seven Year War lasted. “You really don’t know anything about alchemy, do you?”

 

This made even less sense to Maes than Roy reading about insects, but he decided not to press the issue. His sleep deprivation was starting to catch up with him, and he just didn’t have the energy.

 

He let Roy undress him, lifting his arms above his head so Roy could pull off the soft cotton shirt, stepping out of his pants to stand bare but for his boxers and the tags around his neck. Roy ran his fingertips down his chest, his arms, his stomach, growing soft from age and fatherhood. The stretch marks on his hips, the spidery lines radiating from a long-healed bullet wound on his thigh. His shoulders, wide and safe and strong.

 

His hands shook as they ventured lower, but Maes caught his wrists before they could go any farther.

 

“Come to bed,” he said firmly.

 

They fell into bed like they always did - Maes first, taking his time to get comfortable before Roy joined him. Tonight Roy clung, pressing his face to the junction of Maes’ neck and shoulder, wrapping his limbs around every bit of bare skin he could reach. Maes held Roy and his tangle of limbs as best he could, as tight as he could.

 

Roy’s hand found his own underneath the covers. Maes squeezed back.

 

For the first time in weeks, they both slept through the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. based on its location to the west of amestris and the fact that it's a country comprised of many vastly different nations, i think of creta as being sort of the equivalent of "the western world" (aka the americas, europe, south africa, and oceania). obviously france doesn't exist in this universe, but i think one of the nations in creta is very similar to what we know as france.
> 
> 2\. "massalian" is basically just french by a different name. i took the name from "massalia," which is what the ancient greeks and romans called the french city of marseille.
> 
> 3\. the song they were listening to was la javanaise by madeleine peyroux (or serge gainsbourg, if you're feeling fancy).

**Author's Note:**

> i swore to myself i'd never post a fic without a set number of chapters, but i guess things changed. i'm not sure where this is going to go, but i swear to you that it won't end here
> 
> disclaimer: the rating will probably change along the way


End file.
